31 January 2017

I once called scientific articles “love letters to the future.” I was making the point that just because a paper doesn’t get cited soon after its publication does not mean that it is useless.

A new article by Ho and Hartley bears out that description. It focuses on three papers that were largely uncited for many years, the, for some reason, it was noticed and became widely cited.

The authors don’t use my romantic term. There is another established term for these papers, also with romantic overtones: “sleeping beauties.” They pick out three, from the field of psychology, which hasn’t been studied before. This one has the most dramatic citation shift, really only picking up steam when it reached retirement age (65 years after publication!)

While it is encouraging to know that these reversals of fortune can happen, Ho and Hartley show that they are extremely rare. They found only three cases out of over 300,000 psychology papers (0.001%).

The duo don’t identify who re-popularized these papers. It’s a little frustrating, because the paper is pretty short.

30 January 2017

I moved from Canada to the United States in August of 2001 to take a job at what was at the time The University of Texas Pan American.

I have many advantages. I’m from a nation that the United States considers “friendly,” I am white, I am a man, I am a native English speaker, I am a skilled professional in a respected occupation.

And after the events of the last few days (the so called “Muslim ban”), I don’t want to go out of the United States for fear I might not be allowed back in. Or that something bad might happen. I’m nervous about driving to San Antonio, because there’s a Border Patrol checkpoint on the highway I have to drive through.

The executive order isn’t directed at me in any way, but I have eyes. I saw how quickly the ground truth changed. I saw the heavy handed implementation. Even if the “Muslim ban” is ultimately overturned, I saw the needless turmoil it caused. Damn right I’m nervous. I’m fine today, but will I be tomorrow? Next week? The week after that?

I can only imagine the fear and stress that other immigrants must feel, particularly those who don’t have my laundry list of advantages.

I would like to believe the university and the United States have benefited from my presence. In general, the United States has benefited from immigrants, and especially in science. The Manhattan and Apollo projects probably wouldn’t have even started without immigrants. Michio Kaku has certainly argued that the United States has been the preeminent leader in science for decades because of immigrants.

I thank those American citizens who have stood up against the terrible “Muslim ban” executive order and voiced their support for immigrants. And I support my fellow immigrants.

27 January 2017

It started Monday, with the news of the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) being instructed to freeze its grants and stop talking to anyone. And it just escalated, with more agencies getting gag orders, national parks Twitter accounts going viral for tweeting objective scientific facts, the Chair of the House Science committee saying people should get facts from administration and not the media (for double irony, this person is on the caucus for freedom of the press), possible changes to H1B visas that are a staple of many university hiring programs (I had an H1B), and on and on.

And that’s just the stuff that is kind of science related.

Monday night, I said I wanted my scientific professional societies to be ready to fight, like they have never fought before, to defend science. This goes way beyond the usual, “Keep funding coming to science!”, which is important but still kind of self-serving. When you have people literally arguing over whether there are such things as “alternative facts”... the scientific norms of demanding evidence and respecting claims supported by evidence are under so much fire, it is not clear if the scientific enterprise in America will survive, let alone continue to lead the world.

But I digress.

I wanted to report back on my efforts to contact my scientific societies, which I did Tuesday. As of the end of this week, I’ve heard back from most I contacted. I am not identifying the individual societies, but wanted to give an idea of the tone.

“Policy engagement in light of recent events is already on our agenda.”

“We are a voice and will raise the level significantly.”

“I think we have all seen these shocking events. ... I know we want to be poised to respond to this kind of thing in a timely manner, but the timing of any response is important.”

“We have a number of activities in the works over the coming weeks and months, including opportunities for you to reach out to your elected officials to promote the importance of supporting scientific research.”(A bit form-letterish, but okay.)

Presenting new scientific results to media and general public without being muzzled is an important part of the scientific process and progress. And this is a principle that (the society) stands behind. Facts are facts. ... On the other hand, apparently this kind of policy restrictions have however been imposed before(.) So we will follow the situation. At the moment it is hard to know exactly what to do.

One society replied that it is registered as an organization in the US, and that registration means it is “specifically prohibited from partisan political activity.” (However disappointing this may be, it is honest and understandable.)

Out of six societies who replied, I would call it as four responses were positive, one tentative, and one honest case of abstention.

My experience was not unique. Others reported their societies responded positively. Additionally, the Ecological Society of America – somewhat to my surprise – released an open letter to the president.

As a representative of over 10,000 ecological scientists, we ask you to protect the scientific integrity and independence of federal scientists.

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology issued a brief statement. This is the whole thing:

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology believes that peer-reviewed science should remain free of politicization, and we support the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and all federally funded scientific agencies in their efforts to continue on their missions without political interference.

SfN is firmly committed to the free exchange of ideas and information, diversity, and global collaboration in all fields of science. The Society will continue to be a forceful advocate for neuroscience by informing government leaders and the public about the need for robust science funding and its positive impact on the nation’s health and economy.

SfN advocacy has sometimes looked self-interested in bad ways. I hope the society realizes that this is not a time for, “The NIH funds most of our research, and NIH haven’t been affected, so we’re fine.”

Overall, this is a good start. I worry, though, that scientific societies may be too conservative (irony!) in their approach. When you’re in the fight of your life, you can’t pull punches.

In my view the demise of Beall’s project is a sad day for science. While his work was sometimes controversial, he was just about the only person who seemed to take predatory publishing seriously and who tried to do something about it. ...

On the other hand, I don’t think he should have been doing this job alone. ... The one-man nature of Beall’s operation left him open to charges of being arbitrary and opaque in how he decided where to draw the line between legitimate and predatory publishing. I think he made the right calls the vast majority of the time, but then again, he has not been transparent about why he shut down the site.

While I have argued before that I don’t think junk journals are that big a problem, it’s not zero harm, either. Like many predators, junk journals prey on the weak: researchers who are disconnected from a professional community and don’t have a clear understanding of why some journals are not legitimate.

In discussions about our new tenure and promotion requirements in our department, the worry about “What if someone just publishes in predatory journals?” was brought up repeatedly. I argued that this was not that big a problem, and that we had criticized colleagues for publishing in dodgy journals. Beall’s list was one of the resources that we could point at to back up criticisms.

People want resources to help them find their way in the wild west of scientific publishing in the early twenty-first century. And while the Directory of Open Access Journals is a valuable, it has a problem: it’s a whitelist. Beall’s list was a blacklist, and somewhere along the way, Beall mentioned something important:

24 January 2017

As of 01/24/2017 text has not been received for H.R.483 - To amend title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit the provision of funds under such title to institutions of higher education that violate the immigration laws, and for other purposes.

This bill appears to be aimed at punishing universities who provide education undocumented university students. Some of them are called “dreamers,” in reference to the DREAM act.

I think there’s little question that UTRGV has undocumented students. If UTRGV was hit by this legislation, that would mean, I think, no federal research grants. No money from National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, etc. That would seriously affect our chances of becoming an emerging research university.

In light of the EPA freeze, I spent a chunk of today writing emails and filling out contact forms to pretty much every scientific society I belong to. After all, I had tweeted this:

EVERY scientific society in the US better be preparing to defend the EPA. Or science in the US is screwed.#EPAFreeze

This got more than the usual number of likes and retweets. It would be extra crummy of me not to follow up on contacting my professional organizations after arguing that scientific societies need to step up against this kind of stuff.

Ask yourself: “Have my professional societies done anything more political than say, ‘Please don't cut funding?’” Will they fight? #EPAfreeze

Why should scientists press their professional societies to do this? Many are already political advocates in Washington, DC, like the Society for Neuroscience. They have an “Advocacy” button right on the main navigation menu, and their current message from the society president is about strengthening advocacy. Scientific societies have infrastructure and organization and credibility and clout in a way that individuals don’t always have.

So I wrote letters to my scientific societies. I already had the email addresses to some of the presidents. I was disappointed that some societies didn’t give email addresses for their presidents, but they all had “Contact us” forms on their webpages, so those got used.

My letters mostly read something like this.

Hello,

You may have seen news today that several American research agencies, like the EPA and USDA, have been ordered to not talk to the public. The EPA has been instructed to freeze all their grants.

Even though this doesn’t seem to have strong effects on researchers in this field now, I worry about the “domino effect” on other agencies if these sorts of threats aren’t strongly opposed. And I know this is an international society, but certainly many members are in the US.

I personally am hoping my professional societies, like this one, are willing to speak out about the importance of scientists being able to communicate with the public (say). I suspect many scientists would like their societies to show some leadership and be strong advocates for science against political threats.

While I am decided to start by asking scientific societies to become stronger advocates for members specifically and science support generally, citizens living in the United States have elected representatives. I found this Facebook post by Jacquelyn Gill last month extra helpful:

Things I’ve learned* about effective communication with elected officials:

Online petitions are treated like one single correspondence, regardless of how many signatures you get. They’re basically useless.

Tweeting at elected officials is basically pointless unless you are famous.

Phone calls are effective, especially if you can call your district office (rather than the office in Washington), and especially if there is a large surge in calls. Ask for a response. Make sure you state that you’re a constituent.

There is zero point in calling, emailing, or writing to someone who doesn’t represent you (unless you are the CEO of a business or something similar where you can pull financial support from a state). Elected officials only have a mandate to represent their constituents; they will ignore you otherwise.

Personalized written messages are very effective – bonus points if these are hand-written, and double-plus-good bonus points if these are written by kids. Explain exactly why something matters to you, with an anecdote. (E.g., “My kids are scared of their teachers being deported,” or “The Muslim business owner whose shop I frequent is getting harassed.”)

Most elected officials have Google alerts on their names. This means that blog posts, op-eds, articles, or letters to the editor about them get noticed – even if it’s a small-potatoes blog.

* This advice comes from listening to folks who have worked on the Hill or in district offices in several states.

Other countries have faced this sort of thing before, and managed to have political support for research emerge, not intact unscathed, but not eviscerated. But I think the attacks are going to be much, much worse in the United States in the days and months and years to come, and I think American scientists have been more reluctant advocates than in other countries, perhaps because the budgets have been bigger and science has traditionally gotten bipartisan support. But the game has changed, and I don’t know if scientists, and their societies, are going to adjust to the new rules fast enough.

Less than a week in, and Huffington Post reports that the agency has been instructed to freeze all its grants.

And on top of that, there’s a separate list of instructions for the EPA to not talk to anyone.

No press releases will be going out to external audiences.

No social media will be going out. ...

No blog messages.

See also this NPR checklist about the new administration’s current record (such as it is) on scientific issues.

Look, any scientist looking at the rhetoric of the current president knew that things were going to get bad. But I somehow think a lot of them didn’t expect that it would be that bad, which this story seems to indicate it will be.

22 January 2017

This was in reference to yesterday, when the White House press secretary’s lied, stating that the recent American presidential inauguration had, “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

Coincidentally enough, 40 years before Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts,” Doctor Who broadcast “The Face of Evil,” which contained one of my all-time favourite quotes from a show loaded with great quotes:

You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

The Doctor, “The Face of Evil”, Part 4, Doctor Who Season 14 (Production code 4Q). Written by Chris Boucher, directed by Pennant Roberts, originally broadcast on the BBC on 22 January 1977

19 January 2017

At SICB, the committee I chair, the Student and Post Doc Affairs committee, SPDAC, has a noon event every year. It’s usually some sort of workshop. This year, I wanted something that would complement the society’s incoming Code of Conduct for the meeting ,and wanted more of a roundtable than a presentation.

The title I came up for the roundtable was: “Low on the totem pole: power structures and power struggles in academia.”

I was pleased that I had not used the phrase, “Low man on the totem pole.” It’s an often used phrase (as the picture at right demonstrates), but does exclude half the population.

But the title was called out on Twitter as “cultural appropriation.”

It isn’t great considering that the Society is pushing for more
inclusivity, and even has a Broadening Participation Committee (which I
was encouraged to attend). And inclusivity is something I try my best to support.

The gist of the argument, as I understood it, was that the use of
the phrase was inaccurate: the position on a totem pole in First
Nations cultures didn’t indicate anything about power or status.
My first reaction was to clench up and want to say, “I didn’t do anything wrong!” But after a few seconds thought, that didn’t seem to be a particularly helpful reaction.

The first thing I did was to make clear that the title was entirely my choice, and therefore my fault. That way, if anyone was going to be mad about it, they knew to be mad at me, and not the Society in general or the Executive Committee or anyone else. It was my decision, and I had to live with it.

I also said that I was happy to talk about it. The SPDAC had a booth in the conference vendor room, so I did have a place anyone could come and find me. There was a little more discussion on Twitter, but no face to face conversation.

I had some conversations with some people I trust about this to try to judge just how badly I misstepped. Having thought about it, I realized that I could have used several other turns of phrase to get the same point across (like, “Bottom of the heap,” say). And when someone makes a polite request that you not use a phrase, and you can think of another one that makes the exactly point with only a few seconds thought, there’s no point in trying to argue that you were justified in using the phrase.

16 January 2017

We’re in the middle of two new legislative attacks on tenure in the United States. Anti-tenure sentiment is hardly new, but it seems bound to pick up steam when I look at the current sociopolitical trends in the United States, which might be summarized as, “Don’t get comfortable.”

We academics will need to be vocal about why tenure is a good thing (here is my own defense of tenure), but I worry a lot that conditions have moved too far for us to mount an effective defense of tenure.

One of the key reactions I saw on social media to the announced bills was that abolishing tenure would cause a “brain drain” in those states, and the institutions in those states would have a hard time recruiting top notch faculty. My mind immediately jumped to this graph:

Any discussion of the academic job market that doesn’t take this graph into account is woefully deficient. Possibly even negligent.

One of the arguments for tenure is that the the increases job security compensates, to some degree, for the decreased salary. It’s generally accepted that academic pays poorly compared to industry and other non-academic positions. In theory, tenure is such an integral part of being an academic that people should not be willing to accept jobs that do not provide tenure.

The extraordinary surplus of doctoral students rather puts a wrench in that assumption. There are so many doctoral recipients that it is an employer’s market. Sure, you may lose those legendary (mythical?) “best” people, but there are plenty of people with Ph.D.s who are more than good enough: they’re still highly trained, highly skilled, and completely capable of running productive research programs.

And we know that there are many people with doctorates who are desperate enough to take positions that do not offer tenure: many of them are called “adjuncts.”

We are in a crappy situation all around. Tenure has a perception problem, because people see it as a “job for life” and a blanket protection for incompetence (it isn’t). The adjunctification of so many universities demonstrates that there are enough people willing to take jobs without tenure that both legislators and university administrators feel emboldened to reduce or eliminate tenured positions. I am deeply worried that the concept of tenure in the United States may not be able to survive these assaults.

What we are left with is the principle of the thing: tenure is supposed to allow us to do amazing long-term research, and speak truth to power. Fellow academics, if you have tenure, I urge you to use it, actively and frequently.

12 January 2017

I’ve been to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting before, and I’ve been to conferences in New Orleans before. Based on that, you would think this meeting would be routine for me.

It was not. It was a very different meeting experience, for a couple of reasons. First, I was coming off a very intense teaching semester, and I was nowhere near as prepared as I should have been. I felt discombobulated a lot during this meeting,

Second, I was at the meeting not to present any of my own science, not to see any new science. I was participating in my role as chair of the Society’s Student and Post-doctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC). This not only gave me ribbons to put on my badge, it completely changed my conference experience.

First, there were the meetings. I understood that I had my own committee’s meeting to chair. But I didn't quite realize that I was also expected to be at two executive committee meetings, and at the Broadening Participation committee meeting. And two of those were at 7:00 am! By the time I rolled into the second early morning meeting on the last day of the conference, I was grumpy and hated the conference and the world and no amount of variety in the hotel’s breakfast offerings would cheer me up.

Then, there was the SPDAC booth. The committee, unique among all the committees, had a booth in the vendors area to serve as a place where students come ask questions ad voice concerns. I was a little embarrassed by our bare booth, so midway through day one, I got some candy and chocolates to hand out as “booth bait.” I tried to stay at the booth as much as a I could, although this was mostly coffee during coffee breaks and the poster sessions. Staying at the booth did make it a little harder to get to get to sessions and posters.

All of this meant I didn’t see as many talks, or have as many port unities to explore nearby, as I normally would at a meeting.

I also found out rather late in the game that I was expected to give a talk at the first timer’s orientation session. I had a slide deck from their previous year’s talk as a starting point, but I wasn’t given any other parameters. I thought I might be faced with maybe high tens of people, max, in an average sized room.

Instead, I was facing hundreds of people in a combined ballroom. This was just after I had posted my a little essay on why you should always be afraid during a presentation, and it was easy. I would have done things much differently if I’d known how big the room was. I just tried to be breezy and quick and show a lot of advice from people on Twitter. Fortunately, several people told me afterwards that it was good, so I got to breath a big sigh of relief.

My other performance was as the moderator of the SPDAC roundtable on academic power struggles. It took the conversation a little while to get rolling, but once it did, it was very thoughtful and enjoyable. There were lots of good ideas about how students can approach conflict resolution.

I also added three new pokémon to my pokedex in Pokémon Go.

While I had a good time and managed not to have any epic fails during the meeting (other than stores that I wanted to visit closing by the time I got there), I felt the frustration of feeling that I wasn’t prepared and could have done so much better.

The good news is that I have a chance to prove that I can do better in about 51 weeks time, when I head to San Francisco for SICB 2018.

Conference low point: Biting into a Zapp’s Voodoo flavored potato chip. I am a potato chip purist: carbs, fats, and salt are all I crave in a chip, not flavours. But the SPDAC meeting had a box lunch with only Voodoo flavoured chips. I was hungry, thought I would try it, and Cat (one of the committee members) offered me a bite of hers so I didn’t have to commit to opening the whole bag.

I had to spit it out. My instant reaction was, “People eat these voluntarily?”

04 January 2017

One of the best treats over this past holiday season was the debut of Trollhunters on Netflix. This animated series, co-created by filmmaker and monster nerd Guillermo del Toro, is fantastic on all counts.

Early on, the lead, Jim, is given some atypical combat advice from his troll mentor, Blinky. In fact, it’s the first fighting rule for a trollhunter.*

I’m not afraid to give a talk. And that’s currently one of my biggest problems as a presenter: I’ve done presentations too much.

When I first started giving talks at conferences as a grad student, when I got up to the lectern, I was wired. And it was not entirely positive energy arising the excitement of sharing what I had found. No, part of it was nerves because I was afraid.

Fortunately, I was able to take that energy and use it to make the delivery more enthusiastic and animated. A lot of people who have seen me talk have used that word, “energy,” in describing my style. It worked out because I was prepared, I knew what I wanted to say, and knew what my slides were. I was nervous, but not paralyzed by nervousness.

But even as I moved through grad school, and I racked up the presentations about my thesis research, I realized that I wasn’t feeling that rush of nervous energy just before I got ready to deliver my talk.

The problem was not so much arrogance as complacency. You reach a point in developing your writing and presentation skills where you know that you can give a talk without huge preparation, and it will be reasonable. You won’t stink up the room.

With the America’s Best Comics that I’ve been doing... not even a half-arsed, it’s a quarter arsed idea at best(.) “Yeah, that’ll be good, let’s have some three-eyed cowboys. I’ve got no idea what they’re going to do in the story, but this issue’s all about three-eyed cowboys.” I mean, you might think of a story that’s got three-eyed cowboys in it and hope it comes to some sort of resolution, but it always does.

I’ve been working for 25 years now and I can probably bring near enough any story to a satisfactory resolution just because I’ve been doing this every day for 25 years – you get more confident in your ability to bring a story home.

I knew that energy was important to my presentations, and had been important in reaching the audience when I talked. So I deliberately tried to make myself nervous before talks. Nervousness is a kind of energy, and I had done enough talks that I knew I could harness it and get it under control to get my energy level up where it needed to be.

Always be afraid, even if you have given a talk a hundred times before.

* Unfortunately, Trollhunter rule #1 doesn’t get as much play in the series as rule #3, because rule #3 is funnier (you’ll see).